1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus, information processing apparatus, and methods thereof and, more particularly, to an image processing apparatus and information processing apparatus, which are used to protect the rights of image data, and their methods.
2. Description of the Related Art
A technique called Digital Rights Management (DRM) that aims at implementing protection of image data rights and the like is known. The DRM uses the following technique. That is, the DRM sets the use condition of image data upon preparation of the image data. Upon using that image data, the DRM controls use of that image data by checking whether the set use condition is met.
A DRM protection process will be described below. The DRM protection process sets a use condition corresponding to image data to be protected, and generates an encryption key unique to each individual image to encrypt the image data. In the following description, the encryption key to be generated for each image will be referred to as an “image key”. Especially, by transmitting the use condition to a license server, the license server appends its signature on the use condition. The encrypted image data and signed use condition are combined, and the combined data is output as DRM-protected image data.
Upon applying the DRM to image data, a digital camera, image scanner, digital multi-functional peripheral (MFP), or the like (to be referred to as an image processing apparatus hereinafter) has no communication means with the license server. Or the image processing apparatus does not directly communicate with the license server in consideration of communication cost. In such a case, the image processing apparatus must transmit generated image data to a personal computer or the like (to be referred to as a PC hereinafter), and the PC must execute the DRM protection process. In this case, in consideration of the security of image data, the image processing apparatus must encrypt the generated image data, and must transmit it to the PC. The PC must decrypt the encrypted image data, and then apply the DRM protection process to that image data. Encryption in this image processing apparatus is to prevent wiretap or alteration of image data during transmission from the image processing apparatus to the PC.
On the other hand, the normal DRM protection process executes encryption as its internal process. Encryption in the DRM protection process is to protect the rights of image data. Therefore, upon applying the DRM protection process to image data which is generated by the image processing apparatus that does not have any communication means for directly communicating with an information processing apparatus such as a license server or the like without any alteration, encryption of image data is required twice. That is, encryption in the image processing apparatus and then in the PC as the internal process of the DRM are required, resulting in poor efficiency.